


Only Those Who are Afraid to Die Want to Live Forever

by deathrae



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Chronic Illness, Other, and how he's always been a powder keg he just hid it better when he was alive, it stands to reason that as all the original Organization was created, let me tell you about my Isa/Saix headcanons, post-Birth by Sleep, pre-Kingdom Hearts 1, there would be giant heartless around too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 02:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4648485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I know I won't forget you. Believe me, I try all the time.”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>“See? I'm immortal!”</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>There was a reason Lea was so desperate to be remembered, but it tore Isa up inside to watch him die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Those Who are Afraid to Die Want to Live Forever

_“You ready?”_

_“Well I can tell you are...”_

_"Mm."_

 

Under the guise of scanning the courtyard around them, Isa watched Lea carefully as they walked away from the other boy. _Ventus_. He couldn’t even be surprised that Lea picked a fight with him anymore, really. Lea just... had a tendency to get excitable. It gave Isa no end of headaches, but Lea’s warmth and quick burn was one of his better qualities. He wouldn’t be Lea without that certain... spark.

“Are you alright,” Isa offered, after they’d headed down an alley and were out of sight of the main courtyard. It was less question, more rote response to circumstance, though lately Lea had been more open to sharing when Isa prompted him. It was actually sort of nice.

And terrifying.

“Huh?” Lea asked, sounding distracted. In fact, he’d fallen behind a step. Isa turned to look at him, covering his dismay with a polite, detached frown.

“You looked ready to pass out _before_ he even raised his sword. Are you all right?”

Lea rolled one shoulder in a clumsy sort of shrug. “Come on, you know I’m fine. Fine as I’ll ever be. I was just fooling around, y’know? Playin’ with him. But I told you I’d only be a sec, so...”

“Mm.” Lea’s voice had gone reedy and thin, and Isa reached into his pocket for a cloth just as Lea leaned against the brick house beside them, covering his mouth with a hand.

To Isa’s slight surprise, Lea took it. “Thanks,” he managed to say, between racking, painful coughs. He doubled over and Isa braced his shoulder as the boy hacked and rasped for breath, clutching the ragged white scrap to his mouth. Even with his hand blocking it, Isa could make out new dots of blood soaking into the fabric.

“You shouldn’t have started the fight in the first place.” Isa pressed his lips together, frustrated with himself. “You overextended yourself,” he added, struggling to pitch the remark more gentle, less stern. Less... paternal. “Again. You know what the doctor said.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it memorized.” Finally Lea straightened up, looking even more pale than ever, his skin almost white against his vibrant red hair.

“Memorized. Of course.” With a sigh, Isa lightly squeezed his fingers around Lea’s shoulder, in one of his few gestures of comfort. The all too tactile sensation of Lea’s bone too close to the surface of his skin made him struggle not to flinch visibly. It seemed like he could feel every bump and ridge of his collarbone. Lea had always been thin, but it was beginning to be clear to him, if not to Lea himself as well, that if the cough didn’t kill him soon, he would die simply from withering away to a skeleton.

 

_“I want everyone I meet to remember me. Inside people's memories, I can live forever.”_

_“I know I won't forget you. Believe me, I try all the time.”_

_“See? I'm immortal!”_

 

“Come on,” Lea said, and his voice was so worn and thin that he might as well have been whispering. “Castle’s not getting any closer, right?”

“That would be somewhat unlikely, yes,” Isa mused, earning a quiet, wheezy sort of laugh. It sounded painful.

The walk to the castle was relatively short, extended threefold by Lea’s... limitations. _Limitations_ , Isa chose to call it, because the more correct terms stuck in his throat like barbs. Fatigue. Weariness. Exhaustion.

_Weakness._

The word seemed to echo in his own mind when he thought it. _Lea is weak_. Frail, even. Isa could barely remember the time before Lea woke them both up coughing and sweating every night.

 

_“Isa, you must understand, he is very sick.”_

_“But... how sick is ‘very sick’?”_

_“It will kill him. Maybe not today, maybe not in the next two months. But it will.”_

 

His chest ached with how unfair it was. Lea was fire and heat and joy. Lea was warmth and smiles and quick to start, quick to stop flares of fury, both real and feigned.

Lea couldn’t know how angry he was. How much he hated it. How much his hands wanted to tremble with rage when he fed Lea the soup the doctor left. If he stopped eating he would only die faster.

Lea couldn’t know how often Isa told the others to leave them be and sleep, how often he sat under the window with the moonlight on his skin, watching over Lea in his own private vigils.

Lea couldn’t know.

“Hey,” Lea wheezed, bumping his shoulder into Isa’s and jerking him back to the cobblestone streets and the blue sky and the castle distantly overhead. Lea moved in front of him, twisting his head to look up at Isa’s face. “Y’know, if you keep your face like that, it’ll get stuck!”

Isa blinked at him, then pressed his lips together, trying to bite down a smile. “Oh? That would explain a lot about you.”

“Huh?”

Isa pressed a finger to Lea’s forehead and slid around him to keep moving.

“Hey!” Lea hopped after him, tapping his fingers restlessly on his shields where they were strapped to his hips. “ _Anyway_ , what were you thinking about? Must’ve been good with how zoned out you were.”

“Just thinking about how to get into the castle.” The lie slid like water off his tongue and he hated himself for it.

“Got anything good?”

Isa chewed on the inside of his cheek, looking up at the castle as it loomed over them. He tried to remember the details of the various plans he’d developed, discarded, and chosen over for the last two weeks.

As it was, this venture had been more well-researched and deliberated upon than any of Lea’s other half-baked schemes... all of which Isa had inevitably perfected.

 

_“I dunno, I just really want to explore the castle. Before... well. You know.”_

_“Why? Why that castle?”_

_“Aw, I dunno. I bet there’s amazing stuff in there! Come on, you can’t tell me you’re not even a **little** bit curious!”_

 

“The northwest corner is the least well-guarded. If we wait till the patrol goes by, we’ll have about three minutes before the next lap. Which _should_ be enough time to boost you up to the buttress, and then you can give me a hand up. From there we can get to the east room on the second floor where the window doesn’t latch right. I think it’s a library, so, plenty of places to hide.”

“ _Excellent_ ,” Lea rasped, grinning. He knocked a fist against Isa’s shoulder. “Your plans are always foolproof.”

“Not _always_.” Isa rubbed his arm. His plans _did_ have a startlingly high success rate, but that was from before, when Lea wasn’t too bad off yet. When running twenty paces didn’t make him double over coughing up blood, and when he actually managed to eat more than a meal a day. Isa didn’t have the heart to tell him he was afraid Lea wouldn’t be able to support more than his own weight.

 

 

Sometimes... just sometimes, he hated being right.

If Lea were not the better, more agile climber, he might have reversed their roles, had Lea boost _him_ up. He could pull Lea onto the roof easily. But he didn’t trust himself to clamber up alone, even with Lea’s support from below.

Now, he regretted the decision. Now, with one hand scratching at stone for a better grip until he thought his nails might pull and bleed. With Lea straining and scrabbling to hold his elbow, his face turning white again from forgetting to breathe.

“Come _on_ ,” Lea hissed, shoving his sneaker against a stone cap and throwing his upper body back to haul Isa up the last few inches. Isa grabbed Lea’s belt to keep him from falling backward off the buttress as he dragged himself up onto level ground, and for a moment he lay on the hot stone, panting.

Until, that is, he heard the heavy clanking of boots below them. He jumped up, yanking Lea up to standing and all but throwing the other boy the last distance to the roof, leaping behind him and sliding on the shingles.

“We’ll be seen, come on,” he hissed, looping an arm around Lea’s waist when the boy leaned over, wheezing. He hissed a curse under his breath and hefted Lea up beside him, running to hide behind a tower.

Lea was far too light.

“Here,” he said, the sound more breath than word, and set Lea down in the shadow of the tower, pulling out another cloth to cover his mouth as he coughed, trying to muffle him without actually smothering him. “Shh, shh... You’re going to give us away...”

Lea shook his head, though whether it was to push him away or resignation, Isa couldn’t be sure. Lea’s fingers curled around Isa’s wrist, pulling in weak, almost childlike little tugs, then gave up for coughing.

Isa couldn’t decide if this episode seemed longer because of his fear of being caught, or because it actually was longer than the others.

When Lea finally slumped back against the stones behind him, shoulders rising and falling on desperate, raspy heaves, there was blood on the cloth. Real blood. Not just dots. More had gathered at the corners of his mouth, caught in the corners. It stained his teeth pink, where Isa could just barely see them each time Lea opened his mouth to drag in a sharp, painful breath. This time Isa couldn’t stop his hand from shaking as he wiped the blood away.

 

_I just really want to explore the castle. Before... well._

 

 _Before **what**_ , Isa thought miserably, his gaze locked on Lea’s mouth without seeing it at all. _How can you talk about it so flippantly?_

But then, what was Lea, if not flippant? He was all flame, no fuel, and always had been. _Isa_ was his fuel. Isa fed him, let him burn brighter and stronger just for being present.

But what was fuel without fire, if not just dead wood?

“Maybe,” Lea said, and his voice was so thin and scratchy Isa wouldn’t have recognized it if he couldn’t see the sound matching to the tiny, labored movements of Lea’s mouth. “Maybe this was a mistake after all, Isa... Maybe you were right.”

“Now he says it,” Isa grumbled, and smacked the back of his hand into Lea’s shoulder. Lightly, of course, but enough to make Lea flinch and give him a wounded sort of look. “You couldn’t decide that back on the ground, before we climbed all the way up here?”

“Sorry,” Lea said, only he wouldn’t look Isa in the eye.

“Come on, we’re already up here, we might as well finish it,” Isa said, looping an arm under Lea’s arms to haul him up to standing. “Lean on me. We’ll go in the window just there,” he said, pointing. Lea begrudgingly wrapped an arm around Isa’s shoulders, shuffling along with him as Isa picked his way carefully across the roof. He crouched down to lever the window open and slid Lea in first, climbing in cautiously behind him.

He found himself in what was evidently a library. They were each perched on top of a bookcase stuffed full of thick series of books, and he paced cautiously from end to end of the shelf, looking for a way down.

“Holy sh...” Lea said, peering around at the darkened room.

“Hm?” Isa said, looking up to see where he was looking. “ _Oh_.”

The library was _huge._ What he had first thought was the opposing wall was merely another bookcase, and beyond that he could vaguely make out another two or three rows.

“Wow,” Isa said, turning around and slowly lowering himself down the shelves.

“Wh-whoa, be careful,” Lea said, jerking his head out over the edge of the bookcase so that nearly the only thing Isa could see was the shock of red hair jutting out of the darkness.

“Relax.” Isa dropped the last few feet with a soft “oof” as he hit the ground. “Stay up there a second, I’ll find a chair.”

“Okay,” Lea said, his voice soft from distance and overuse.

Isa dusted off his hands and looked around, frowning at the utter lack of light. For a library this size, it was surprisingly dustless. Good, for Lea, but...odd. _People must use it regularly_...

That was bad.

He glanced back, using Lea’s fluffy red hair as an anchor point as he checked between a few more bookcases. He finally found a chair that looked like it would be light enough for him to move, straining to get it off the ground as he carried it back to where he’d left Lea.

“Holy shit,” Lea muttered when Isa finally came back and tried not to just drop the chair on the ground.

“Yeah?” Isa asked, panting and climbing up onto the chair, raising his arms. “Climb down, come on.”

“You were just gone a long time,” Lea muttered, slowly sliding his body over the side of the bookcase, lowering himself down until Isa could catch his shoes and support him.

“Were you _scared_ for me, Lea?”

“W-wha– Of course not! Don’t be stupid,” Lea blustered, hopping down from Isa’s arms to get to the ground and dust himself off.

“Of course.”

“I don’t get _scared!”_ Lea snapped, only barely keeping his voice hushed when Isa waved his hands for quiet. “Oh shut up,” he grumbled, shoving Isa aside and stomping past him.

At least the distraction seemed to have helped him a little.

Isa smirked and fell into step a little behind Lea, peering around the shelves and tugging on the back of his shirt to get him to slow down. “We have to be careful,” he whispered.

“I know, I know,” Lea grumbled, exploring a little down another hallway as Isa went the other way, peering around the shelves and looking for a door. “Whoa... hey, Isa.”

He doubled back, frowning. “What?”

Lea was bent almost double, examining a book sitting on a shelf. “This doesn’t look like it’s in the right place.”

Isa bit down a laugh. “I never took you for the type to alphabetize books, Lea.”

“I’m not,” Lea agreed, grinning over his shoulder. “But I wonder...”

Isa frowned as Lea grabbed the top of the book and yanked, jumping back as the entire set of shelves slid to the side, revealing a set of stairs downward. Something tap-tapped behind him and Isa looked over his shoulder, searching for the source of the noise.

“Whoooooa,” Lea said, his face lighting up. “Now _this_ is why we came in here! Come on!”

Isa frowned, still looking around. “Lea, I don’t think...”

“Come on, don’t be a chicken.”

“There’s something in here.” Isa tugged at Lea’s arm and Lea turned around, peering into the darkness with him.

“Don’t be...” Something, he wasn’t sure what, lurched in the shadows, and Lea trailed off, far less sure of himself. “Stupid...”

“Come _on!”_ Without thinking Isa grabbed Lea’s arm to throw him over his shoulders and bolted down the stairs. The thing in the dark snarled and leapt after them, slamming into the bookshelf, sending a cascade of books down on top of it. He could hear it roaring and struggling to get the books off, but maybe they’d be alright...

“It’s still coming!” Lea yelled, his voice shrill and hoarse.

Isa turned to try to see how much time they had. He saw yellow eyes in the darkness and he twisted, catching his shoes on the stone steps.

He lurched forward off the stairs and down to the ground.

Lea tumbled off his back, yelping, and Isa stumbled, hitting his head on a step and rolling end over end. He almost caught himself, flipping over to standing, but his shoe slid out from under him with a sickening twist and he felt his heart jump into his throat on a sudden, terrifying spike of pain. He crumpled to the floor, clutching his leg, a tiny, strangled wail slipping out from behind his teeth.

Lea flicked on a lighter. They had come to rest in a startlingly white and silver room. The walls were cold, unfeeling, and clean. The floor...was not.

The floor was splattered with blood. Someone else’s blood. And cloth. And _shapes_ further off in the darkness beyond the sphere of Lea’s little flame. Isa felt his stomach churn and Lea looked like he was going to be sick.

Lea staggered over to him and looked at his leg, then covered his mouth with his hand. “Holy shit,” he mumbled from behind his hand, looking at Isa’s ankle, already swelling dangerously. “Shit, what do we do.”

Isa looked up at him, and from the look in Lea’s eyes he knew he must’ve looked pale and terrified, pain making his right eye twitch. “Shh, we’ll figure this out.”

Lea’s lighter guttered out.

“Shit– shit!”

“Don’t–”

The frantic clicking of him trying to turn it back on seemed deafening in the otherwise silent room. Why hadn’t the thing with yellow eyes come after them?

“...panic.”

When the lighter flared back to life, Isa realized somebody was standing behind Lea. Slowly raising some kind of weapon over Lea’s head. He looked...he looked like he didn’t have a face.

Just a body.

Just...nobody.


End file.
